I've spent some evenings and weekends working on a toddler bed frame for some friends recently (post to follow, sooner or later), and reached a point where I need to wait for someone else to finish their part. This past weekend I built an English layout square, mostly for practice: it's got legs somewhere around 22" long, which is bigger than is really useful in my tiny shop. I hope to post an article about that either tomorrow or Monday.
But once that was done, I looked around and realized I'd been neglecting my tools recently. Oh, I do a quick touchup with a strop while I'm working, but a few of my planes weren't cutting well anymore. Last night I started working on getting everything back into top shape. A lot of people seem to dislike sharpening, which I can understand: it's a lot of time and effort that could otherwise be spent working on wood. I still enjoy it, though, because every time I sharpen my tools, I get a better edge than I did the time before.
Last night I went over the cutters for my #3, #4, #5, and one of my block planes. The block plane is low angle, and was a particular triumph, since it never cut right to begin with. I finally got out some coarse sandpaper and and a honing jig, and re-ground the bevel. Finally, it works well enough to get a good cut across end grain.
Next up are chisels: none of them are as sharp as they could be, and a few of them I've never actually sharpened, since I haven't needed something that width. Once those are done, I may tackle my dovetail saw: it's gotten dull enough that I don't really use it, which means it's time to fix it up.
